Highly intensive and controllable supratransmission in a Kresling-origami metastructure

Abstract

The on-demand control of supratransmission is of fundamental importance for practical applications in areas such as energy transmission. The occurrence of supratransmission is closely related to the nonlinear medium through which the strong nonlinear waves are transmitted. However, designing a simple and practical nonlinear medium with the capacity to enable intensive and controllable supratransmission has remained a challenge. In this work, we employ the well-known Kresling origami, which has been widely used in applications such as soft robotics and functional devices, to address the above challenge. Through numerical simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed metastructure can achieve on-demand control of intensive supratransmission by simply tuning the initial rotational angle of the Kresling origami. The excited amplitude during supratransmission can be almost an order of magnitude higher than its driving amplitude, the intensity of which has rarely been achieved in practical nonlinear media. The current work not only offers useful guidelines for the future developments of various supratransmission-based applications with controllable properties, but also provides new insights into how the Kresling origami may be employed to interact with strong nonlinear waves.